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Thursday, June 08, 2006

On the ground in Iraq

Closing the strategic gap in Iraq requires that our military and civilian leaders come to grip with the harsh realities on the ground. The hope for a secular, democratic society is at present a pipe dream. Sectarian power is the rule of law in Iraq and it is a law enforced through violence, torture, and intimidation. At this juncture, our military is dutifully, bravely, and tirelessly stacking sand bags to try to hold back the surging flood waters of sectarian violence. Unfortunately, there is no sign that the rain of intolerance is easing or that the waters of hatred are receding.

thanks for the view from the ground... i can't help but say, however, that talking about how to either improve the iraq situation or disengage, misses the entire point... the system that put us in iraq in the first place is seriously diseased and, while the bush administration is certainly the most egregious example of a disease out of control, the cancer has been spreading since ww2... the overused metaphor, re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic, nevertheless captures the current dynamics fairly well...

yes, our continuing presence in iraq is fueling the sunni-shiite obsession for blowing each other up and probably is producing new zarqawis by the day... but so is our continuing support of israel and our refusal to help structure an honest settlement with the palestinians who are now being punished for exercising their democratic rights... we fuel global outrage when a corrupt mafia don like dick cheney denounces russia in vilnius and then flies on to court a barbaric despot in kazakhstan because the despot controls oil and gas reserves... we earn enmity when we torture detainees in black-site prisons and funnel them via extraordinary rendition to other countries whose interrogation methods are worse than ours... ridicule and scorn are our just due when we persist in claiming that iran is mere months away from having a nuclear weapons capability when all available intelligence says that isn't the case...

so, yes, iraq is an immediate problem to be solved but, relatively speaking, it is only a pimple on the ass of our much bigger problem... our country is a mess, our constitution and bill of rights are being fed daily into the shredder, and what are we going to do about it...